This note presents an empirical analysis of optimal taxation in Chile, adopting Roemer’s equality of opportunities as the evaluation criterion. The equality of opportunities optimal tax rules seek to equalize income differentials arising from factors beyond the control of the individual....

This article takes advantage of a new source of information, the 2006 Gallup World Poll, to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin Americaand the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC with other regionsin the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage...

In this study it is demonstrated that standard income inequality measures, such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini index, can successfully be applied to the distribution of Olympic success. Olympic success is distributed very unevenly, with the rich countries capturing a disproportionately higher...

In this article we examine the dynamic causal relationship between economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction in South Africa – using the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure. The study attempts to answer one critical question: does economic growth in...

This article examines inequality and poverty among older people in Japan. It compares Japan with that of a sample of other OECD countries. Provisions within the social insurance system that enable old-age pensioners to work and draw incomes from labor explain some of the inequality and poverty...

This article carries out a validation exercise of vulnerability measures as predictors of poverty at the aggregate and micro levels based on short and long term panel data for Argentina and Chile. It then compares their performance to that of deprivation indicators. The main findings indicate...

This article analyzes the impact of risk on decisions made by the poor within the context of the Individual Development Account (IDA) program. IDA is a matched savings program designed to help low-income households invest in appreciating assets. For these households, the risk involved with...

This article represents the first step in filling a large gap in knowledge concerning why Public Assistance (PA) use recently rose so fast in Japan. Specifically, we try to address this problem not only by performing a Blanchard and Quah decomposition on long-term monthly time series data...

The aim of this paper is to estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from publicly provided education and to analyze their impact on the income distribution and on economic inequality in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and taking into...